Read Online Scary Out There by Jonathan Maberry - Free Book Online

tourists.
    Besides, neither Tammy nor Elaine had any problem with the skimpy uniform, and if Frank wanted girls to dress that way and chase down cars, that was all right with them.
    At least he wasn’t weird about it.
    Frank was a big guy, wide in the shoulders, with thighs like tree trunks, and the sort of chest where a big tattoo would look right at home. The way he talked—the way he handed out orders and suggestions, the way he taught them how to use the equipment—you could tell he’d been a military man. He wasn’t unkind, but he was direct. He wasn’t unreasonable, but he was demanding.
    Tammy and Elaine caught on quick, and Frank approved.
    He liked them not just because they were pretty red-haired sisters, but because they were sturdy farm girls who’d grown up in orchards, climbing orange trees and working hard for a living. Swimming around in the tank was tough, especially with legs bound together in phony fins and only a set of skinny, hidden tubes to breathe from. It didn’t matter how pretty a girl was, because if she wasn’t hardy enough to swim and smile without much air, she wasn’t ready to join the show.
    Tammy was all set to swim within one week, and her older sister joined the next.
    For their first show together Frank dressed them up the same—passing them off as twins for the sake of the underwater play they were performing.
    It worked out well. The girls were only a year apart—“Irish twins”their mother called them—and with enough of the right greasepaint glitter makeup, at a distance, inside the tank, nobody knew the difference.
    The tiara Tammy picked up at the yard sale helped. It gave the audience a way to tell them apart. She twisted the hairpiece into her curls as tight as she could, pushing the metal bobby pins up against her scalp to keep it secure through all the swirling, diving, and splashing. With the tiara perched on her head, that little coronet with the tacky stones, Tammy was the one to watch.
    She was the girl with the silver crown.
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    The shows took on a comfortable, familiar pattern.
    Sometimes, the themes were different—pirates, or police, or shipwrecks—but the daily routine was usually the same. Every day, there was practice and training, with Frank barking the story along through a megaphone. Every day, there was time spent sipping from the tiny air hoses and learning to breathe without gasping in front of the audience.
    Breathe and smile. Drink a bottle of fizzy Grapette underwater while the kids clapped and their parents wondered How on earth do they do that?
    But they weren’t on earth.
    They performed beneath it, under the blue skin of the pooled spring and down in front of the enormous, underground window—they frolicked like polar bears in a zoo, withonly the thick and tinted fishbowl glass between them and the wide-eyed watchers.
    And all the people in the auditorium sat and shivered, cool as almost ice in the orange-hot heat of a Florida afternoon. Openmouthed, they watched the women in bright bathing suits from a fairy tale—they saw how their fins twisted in the current, how their smiles stayed in place because people had paid good money to see them.
    It was magic, and it hid out in the open. The rules were different, there.
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    â€œCar!” Frank bellowed through his megaphone. “Car!”
    All the girls knew what to do. The mermaids rallied from the tank with a flurry of flinging water. Wet hair went tied up in scarves or combs, and fins were quickly, carefully stripped. Pruney feet with painted toenails felt about for sandals, and, finding them, they pattered away from the spring.
    â€œHurry up!” Frank hollered. He pulled a short-sleeved, button-up shirt over his wet chest and retreated toward the ticket office. “Go get ’em, ladies!”
    All eight of the mermaids on duty charged out of the